SOURCE: CARTEL’S BROTHERS SECRETLY MET AT MIRAMAR

One Arellano told the other he would testify against him

In late 2011, two brothers who had not seen each other for years but shared a family history of violence and drug smuggling met for several hours under extraordinary secrecy and heavy security in San Diego.

The meeting at a building at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar brought together Francisco Javier Arellano Félix and his older brother, Benjamín Arellano Félix. Each had once led the family organization based in Tijuana that earned millions in drug smuggling profits and was among the most feared cartels in Mexico.

At the time, Javier was serving a life sentence after pleading guilty to federal charges related to his tenure as the cartel’s boss. Benjamín, who had first led the family business to its heights as the leading cartel on the border before his apprehension in Mexico in 2002, had been extradited to San Diego to face trial a few months before the meeting.

The secret encounter between the two, which has never been publicly discussed, was arranged to convince Benjamín that Javier had agreed to testify against his brother, said a source with knowledge of the meeting. Prosecutors had said he would be their star witness.

But Benjamín was skeptical that his own brother would turn on him and go against the family business. Javier was flown in from a secret location, and the brothers spoke in a room under heavy guard but without lawyers, said the source, who is not authorized to speak about the meeting and asked for anonymity.

What precisely was said between the two isn’t known. But weeks later, in January 2012, Benjamín Arellano pleaded guilty to racketeering and money laundering charges and received a 25-year prison sentence.

Details about the meeting and Javier turning on his older brother come as other information is emerging that Javier has been cooperating with authorities in the U.S. and Mexico and is likely part of a witness protection program operated by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

Protection for cartel boss

Javier Arellano, now 43, was arrested in international waters by U.S. agents in 2006, plucked off his luxury yacht. He faced the death penalty, but in 2007 then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez decided not to seek that punishment. Two days after that decision, Javier pleaded guilty in federal court in San Diego and was eventually given a life term.

Some members of San Diego’s legal community have long suspected that Javier’s willingness to cooperate with law enforcement led U.S. prosecutors to drop the death penalty. That cooperation also has likely landed him among a select group of federal prison inmates who are housed under a special witness protection program.

The federal Witness Security Program is better known for protecting people on the outside of prison walls — former mobsters or their associates who have testified against dangerous criminals in exchange for a new identity and life in a secret location.

But the Bureau of Prisons runs the program for inmates on the inside who have agreed to testify against major criminals.

Benjamín Arellano, 61, is serving his sentence at a prison in Florida. Brother Eduardo Arellano Félix will likely be sent to a similar high-security prison in a different part of the country when he is sentenced today in federal court in San Diego for his role in the Tijuana cartel.

But Javier’s exact whereabouts can’t be determined.

His name doesn’t appear in an online inmate locator for federal prisoners. The media relations office of the Bureau of Prisons was twice asked if it could say where Javier is located, and both times the office confirmed he was not in the prison inmate database.

When asked if that meant he was in the witness program, a spokesman refused to comment or answer any question on that issue.

U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy, who worked on the indictment against the cartel and then prosecuted Javier herself, was also mum. In a statement last week, her office said only that Javier was in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons somewhere in the U.S.

Clues in leaked document

In July, Mexican media reported on a leaked, 12-page deposition taken in February 2012 in San Antonio by investigators with the Mexican Attorney General’s Office.

A man identified as “Howard” told investigators that the brother of a candidate for governor in Baja California was on the Arellano Félix cartel’s payroll when he worked in Mexican law enforcement.

Howard is described in the document, written in Spanish, as a “collaborating witness,” providing information on his criminal organization.

In the deposition, Howard refers to his “brothers” Benjamín, Eduardo and Ramon, the names of Javier Arellano’s siblings. Ramon was killed in a shootout in Mexico in 2002 and was not prosecuted by the U.S.

Howard was accompanied in the deposition by his lawyer, identified in the documents as Mark F. Adams.

Adams represented Javier when the U.S. attorney prosecuted him in San Diego. Adams declined last week to discuss the document or his client.

A U.S. Department of Justice audit of the prison witness program in 2008 said about 500 inmates were under protection, housed in special units inside seven facilities in the U.S. Only people on an approved list are allowed to visit these inmates.

John Kirby, a former federal prosecutor who worked with Duffy on the Arellano Félix indictments and is now in private practice, said Javier is likely in the program, known by the acronym WITSEC. “He’s clearly in the BOP WITSEC,” he said.

Nathan Jones, a drug policy expert at Rice University in Houston who has studied the Tijuana cartel, said it’s long been assumed Javier cooperated in exchange for not facing the death penalty. It also would make sense that he is in protective custody, Jones said.

“When you testify against people and it involves your own family, you’re going to need some kind of protection,” he said.

The last of the cartel’s brothers will be sentenced today. Eduardo Arellano, 56, is to receive a 15-year prison sentence after pleading guilty this year to money laundering and investing illicit drug profits.

Federal prosecutors said Eduardo was a key adviser to Benjamín during the rise of the cartel. But in 1993 Eduardo largely dropped out of the daily operation following the killing of Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo in Guadalajara in a shootout between the Arellano Félix Organization and another drug cartel.

For 15 years, Eduardo lived in isolated, heavily guarded homes in Tijuana, prosecutors wrote in court documents. But during that time, they said, he continued to help launder money and purchase real estate and other assets for the drug cartel.

He was captured in 2008 by Mexican authorities and extradited to the U.S. in 2012.